RegattaCentral synchronization

First, find the RegattaCentral ID for your regatta. Save that in RDS on the Setup Regatta page.

Go to RC->RegattaCentral organizations. As clubs put entries into RC, they will appear here. If RDS knows their RC organizationId, it will display information such as the Entries link. If it doesn’t, we need to take note of the organizationId, go to Admin->Clubs, look up the club, click on the name of the club, enter the RC organizationId, click Save.

Next, go to RC->RegattaCentral Events. We need to connect the events in RegattaCentral. For each of your Regatta Central events, choose an event from the event dropdown, as well as selecting a schedule_group (this bit we can change later). Press Create RRE’s. If the event is already created, the RC connection process will complain that the RegattaEvent already exists, but that doesn’t matter.

Once the events are connected, the next step is to move entries over. Notice that the Entries column is being populated with links. Clicking (I recommend Ctrl-clicking) opens another page that allows the entries to be synchronized. If there are entries to be copied over, they should come with checkboxes checked. If there are entries that have been scratched, they have a checkbox for deletion from RDS.

Once the entries are copied over, the final stage is synchronization of athletes.

We can lookup RC information for athletes already in RDS. Go to Admin->Clubs, and then click the RC lookup for a club, or you can go to RC->RegattaCentral organizations, and click on RC lookup. This will list all of the athletes listed in RDS, and try looking them up in RC if this has not been done already. Athletes found in RC will be listed in the last column, along with the clubs they are affiliated with in RC. You may see the same athlete has more than one RC entry. There’s nothing we can do about this, except ask the club to sort it out.

As the club adds entries, its list of participants for the regatta grows. This can be accessed from the RC->RegattaCentral organizations page, by clicking on the Participants link. This page connects athletes by searching through RDS for a match (which is a bit of a slow process, especially the first search in a session - give it a few seconds). If the search fails, it automatically creates a matching person in RDS. This becomes messy if a club has duplicates in its RC athlete list, and worse if they then use more than one of the duplicates in their crew lists.

Finally, if we are back at the Entries page, we can update the crew list for each entry by clicking on the Athletes link. (This may seem like a large task, but frequent use of ctrl-click and later ctrl-w make quite short work of this, especially once the athletes are established in RDS). The Athletes link will be colour-coded according to the action you need to take. If it is red, the club has not entered athletes, so there is nothing for you to do (except nag them). If the link is green, the athlete list in RC matches the athlete list in RDS (and there’s nothing for you to do). If the link is yellow, the athlete lists do not match, so you should follow the link and fix things. In most cases, the page knows what to fix and usually only wants you to click Save.

At some date, you’ll want to tell your clubs to stop changing things in RC (and perhaps only change things in RDS) so that you can stop synchronizing…